"Televisions"

When the first exhibitions of works on televisions were being held in Germany and the United States in the 1960s, Lars Fredrikson strated his works in this medium by creating his own frequency synthesizers that would let him generate forms on cathode-ray screens.

Fragmented and polysensorial drawings produced by sound pulses, these flashes of light spark persistence of vision. Lars Fredrikson built a system designed to resonate with bodily rhythms - heartbeats, blood flow, brainwave frequencies - and generating in the long term the psychophysical effects found in his sound works.

These hallucinations are triggered by the onset of a hypnagogic state - between wakefulness and sleep - and demonstrate  the importance the artist attached to producing altered states of consciousness. 

In 1969 Fredrikson filed a patent for the invention of a "process and system to produce traces of continuous variation on a screen or musical percussion rhythms in a loudspeaker." The same year, he showed his televisions at a solo exhibition at the Maison des Quatre-Vents in Paris and took part in "Electromagica 69" at the Sony Building in Tokyo. He was featured in the first major video art exhibition in France, "Art video Confrontation 74", at the ARC in the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1974.

Extract from the text "Télévisions", Catalogue of the retrospective exhibition Lars Fredrikson at the MAMAC in Nice, November 2019 (ed. MOUSSE PUBLISHING 2019, page 153)